Morocco: From Empire to Independence

Abstract

COUNTRIES are moulds into which historians have traditionally poured their efforts without necessarily answering the question, why? If countries are to have their own histories, what might these be—the story of the land, its inhabitants, their civilisation, the state, or simply its representation in the sources? In the modern world, when land and people are both defined by the state, and civilisation is a property of the nation which the state supposedly represents, the answer is likely to be the story of how this state of affairs arose. Butterfield's ‘Whig interpretation’ may have rendered such historiography suspect, but the extension of the Western principle of the nation-state to the world at large has exported it to countries as old as Japan and as new as Zambia. Morocco, and the book under review, is a case in point. Tracing the story ‘from empire to independence’, Richard Pennell's work is a political history of state formation in Morocco over more than two millennia, that in the course of the past thousand years has resulted in the formation of today's Moroccan state within its present borders. His justification is that the state in question dates from the seventeenth century, and can only be understood in the light of its antecedents; he might have added that its development was accompanied by the growth of a Moroccan consciousness that gave rise at the end of the nineteenth century to just such a political history of the country: the Kitāb al-Istiqsā ’ li-akhbār duwal al-Maghrib or ‘Book of Research into the Information regarding the Dynastic States of the Maghrib [sc. Morocco]’ by al-Nāsirāsirā, ‘the Furthest West’, was incorporated into the ‘common market’ of the Arab empire, from Spain to Central Asia. It took place from north to south: as the region to the north of the limes developed along the route from the east through Tangier to Cordoba, the region to the south was colonised by immigrants who crossed the mountains to the desert in search of the silver of the Anti-Atlas and the gold of the Western Sudan. Political unification, however, once again as part of a larger whole, was achieved from the south, as the appeal of Islam to the Berber tribesmen of the western Sahara created the Almoravids, a militant community dedicated to war upon the infidel. The foundation of Marrakesh in 1070 was the first step in the creation of an empire that included Morocco in a dominion stretching into Algeria and Spain; taken over in 1147 by the Almohads of the High Atlas, it then stretched as far as Tripoli. From Marrakesh comes Morocco, but the identification was for a future that began to take shape only after the break-up of this empire in the thirteenth century. The territory of modern Morocco then fell to the Marinids, a tribal dynasty from the Tafilelt in the south-east, who established their capital at Fes in the north. But that was both less than they aspired to and more than they achieved over the subsequent two hundred years. After the failure of successive attempts to reconstitute the Almohad empire, their dominion shrank to the region of Fes. Reunification came in the sixteenth century with the Sa‘dians from the Draa valley in the south, when ‘the Kingdom of Morocco’ entered the European vocabulary following their establishment at Marrakesh. To the east, their expansion was halted on the line of the modern frontier by the Turks at Algiers, but to the south it extended across the Sahara to Timbuktu. In the seventeenth century this vast empire disintegrated, to be reconstituted north of the Sahara by the ‘Alawites, a dynasty once again from the Tafilelt who established themselves at Fes and Meknes, and created the state which the French eventually took over, modernised, and restored to the monarchy at independence in 1956. In the process they deliberately cut it off from the Sahara, in which the ‘Alawites had retained a strong interest, but which was now divided between Algeria, French West Africa and the Spanish Sahara. The annexation by Morocco of the former Spanish territory along the Atlantic coast in 1975 was the only practicable step towards the recovery of past empire in the cause of a Greater Morocco, the contemporary manifestation of that expansionism which has characterised the dynasties of the Maghrib al-Aqsā for the past thousand years. Mired for the past thirty years in a thoroughly modern controversy over its legality, it will probably be the last. The sequel, Morocco: From Independence to Empire, is unlikely to be called for.